What Happened to Public Schools in America?

I’m almost 70-years-old. I was brought up in rural South Georgia, and my family moved to Athens, Georgia when I was in the 6^th grade. My schooling, all of it, was in public schools. I can’t remember a single teacher who tried to indoctrinate me with his or her political agenda or one who taught anything other than the subject at hand.

Things have changed.

My wife and I moved to Virginia with our family when my oldest daughter was 3-years-old. Our youngest daughter was born in Charlottesville. We raised our family in the Charlottesville community.

Charlottesville is the home of the University of Virginia. I was a faculty member at the University of Virginia. By the time I retired in 2004, both of our daughters had graduated from college and moved out on their own.

In 2016, the population of Charlottesville/Albemarle County was about 155,000. In 1979 when we moved to the area, the population was about 96,000.

Charlottesville is a typical university town with two notable exceptions:

UVA has a very large medical school. Medical doctors in the Charlottesville/Albemarle County area represent a much larger percentage of the population than is normal for cities and counties that size.
Charlottesville is about 100 miles south of Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital exerts considerable influence on the Charlottesville community.

Saying that the Charlottesville/Albemarle County area is loaded with really smart people is an understatement.

My wife, Katie, was a public school teacher in Georgia before we moved to Virginia. In Virginia, she was a stay-at-home mom during our daughters early years, but she was very active in the public schools that our daughters attended.

Katie started telling me about problems that she saw in our daughters’ schools right away. As the years passed, things got worse. When our youngest daughter was in the 5^th grade, we took her out of public school and enrolled her in a private school. Our oldest daughter wanted to stay put, so we let her.

In my mind’s eye, the public schools that our daughters attended in Virginia were like the ones that I went to as a boy in Georgia. My teachers did their jobs. In the early years, they taught me how to read, write, and do arithmetic. As I advanced, they taught me higher math and science, U.S. and world history, and literature.

Some of my teachers were fantastic. Others were very good. With one exception, none of my teachers were losers. The one exception was an algebra teacher who was also a football coach. He didn’t know much about algebra. I dropped his class and transferred into the class of the toughest algebra teacher in the school. It made a world of difference.

As I said, I can’t remember one instance of a teacher trying to indoctrinate me politically in school. That would have been out of the question. We were not in school to be indoctrinated. We were there to be educated, and my teachers knew it. As far as I know, no one had to tell my teachers that they were there to teach. They knew what they were supposed to do, and they did their jobs.

My daughters’ schools were different. Political indoctrination seemed to be part of the curriculum. Katie saw it firsthand. I heard about it from her. At first, I had a hard time believing it, but eventually I learned that she was right.

I’ll give you one example to prove my point, but I can assure you that there are many examples I could have used. When our oldest daughter took U.S. history and studied World War II, her teacher emphasized the fact that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan. In her teacher’s world, that was the only significant thing that happened in World War II, and she portrayed the U.S. as the villain.

When I asked my daughter what she knew about Pearl Harbor, she said, “Nothing.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t register with her teacher as an important event, so she didn’t teach it. When I asked my daughter if she knew how many Japanese and Americans would have died in a land invasion of the Japanese homeland, she seemed surprised by the question. Her teacher didn’t think that bit of information was worthy of discussion, either.

World War II = Hiroshima + Nagasaki, and the U.S. was the bad guy. That’s all my daughter’s teacher thought her students needed to know.

As horrific as the two atomic weapons dropped on Japan were, the loss of life resulting from those attacks was much less than the expected loss of life from a land invasion of Japan. Thousands more Japanese citizens would have been killed during a land invasion, and many thousands of American soldiers would have died as well. So, those two bombs actually saved lives.

When General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is hell,” he wasn’t whistling Dixie.

Many years later, I was teaching a leadership class at the University of Virginia. During a discussion, the dropping of those two bombs came up. The person who brought it up was very smart and well educated. She came from Northern Virginia (the D.C. area), and she had gone to an exclusive private school. She questioned the morality of using atomic weapons to end the war. I asked her what she knew about the estimates of deaths if we had fought a land battle in Japan to end the war.

She didn’t have a clue, so I told her to look it up and be prepared to report her findings to the class the next time we met. She did as I asked. As I said, she was smart. Her perspective changed completely when she understood that one piece of information. Her teacher did her a disservice at great cost to her parents.

How could an honest teacher fail to mention such an important fact? Turns out that her history teacher was like my daughter’s history teacher. In their worlds, the U.S. is the global villain. From their perspective, that’s the most important lesson to be learned from World War II.

I wish I was making this up, but I’m not.

I have discovered that people my age tend to think public schools today are like the ones we attended. They are not. Public schools have become indoctrination centers. Whatever the latest politically correct topic happens to be is what is being taught in our public schools. It’s almost as though reading, writing, and arithmetic are secondary topics that public school teachers try to cover if they have enough time.

For instance, how did “sexual identity” become a major topic for discussion in public schools? I have no idea, but it did.

Right now, our public schools are teaching our children and grandchildren that there are many genders and that each person must decide what he or she is or wants to become. Public school teachers refer to people like me disparagingly, because we know that there are only two genders, male and female. They think we are hopelessly trapped in a binary world.

I think they are crazy.

When police started arresting Antifa members for committing violent acts and publishing information about the criminals, I was amazed to discover that many public school teachers are also members of Antifa. It seems as though indoctrinating our young people isn’t enough. A very large number of public school teachers are radical revolutionaries. Their goal is to make the U.S. over in their perverted image, and they are doing it in our public schools.

See “Public School Teachers Behind Violent Antifa Group”.

See “MILITANT PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER TOOK STUDENTS TO ANTIFA PROTESTS, LIED ABOUT ABSENCES, RECORDS SHOW”.

See “Public School Teachers Among the Leaders of Important Antifa Faction”.

See “Berkeley teacher/Antifa leader ordered to pay $20,000 for withholding public records of her activism”.

I am a big supporter of school choice. It makes perfect sense for many reasons, not the least of which is that people have different interests. Not every student wants to go to college, and not every student is college material. So, why should our public schools try to prepare every student for college? That makes no sense, but that’s exactly what we are doing, very badly I should add. For the good of our country and to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars, that must change.

We need to stop thinking of all public school teachers as virtuous individuals and all public school administrators are upstanding citizens. Some of them, maybe many of them, are the dregs of society. We need to overhaul our public schools and root out the bad actors.

I still believe in the importance of public schools, but not public schools like the ones we see today. I’ll be the first to admit that some public schools are excellent and that some public school teachers are excellent, but many public schools are nothing more than indoctrination centers. Many of the teachers in our public schools should be fired.

For the good of our nation, our public schools must change. Spending more money on public education isn’t the answer. We already spend more money per student on public education than virtually any developed nation. We need to spend our money more wisely.

See “The US spends more on education than other countries. Why is it falling behind?”.

Ignoring our problems in pubic education is costing us dearly. We have a lot of work to do. Let’s get started.

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“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17: 22-24)